I read an article in today’s Independent entitled Napoleon’s piles: How footnotes changed history. It’s about a new book. The section that caught my eye was this one:
Tea breaks made a nation
A Cambridge professor put forward a theory in 2000 that the Industrial Revolution took off in Britain, rather than anywhere [...]
Archive for December, 2008
Interesting background to historical events
31 12 08Happy New Year!
31 12 082008 was quite a year, but mainly for the wrong reasons. Let’s hope 2009 brings some positive developments.
Pictures of children in London
27 12 08The kids in this photo are hoping to collect lumps of coal falling off the backs of lorries, during the General Strike of 1926 (in which Tom took part). The workers were defeated in the strike and their conditions worsened. The children look remarkably cheerful.
Keka turns 18
23 12 08Yet another milestone. My daughter Angelica turned 18 yesterday. In the evening, some of her friends turned up to serenade her.
Most of them are studying music and have a preference for jazz-rock (which they refer to simply as fusión), so we ended up watching several of my music DVDs. They particularly liked Colosseum. The sax [...]
An unusual shot of a Routemaster bus
22 12 08This photo was taken at Millwall Dock in the 1960s. The bus being loaded on to the ship is a Routemaster, one of the most iconic sights to be seen in post-War London. Wiki has a very extensive entry on the bus (here). The technology that went in to the design of the bus was, [...]
I added a photo to my original Pie and Mash post
22 12 08You can see it here.
More photos of Stogs
21 12 08I took these photos at Southwark History Library. The quality is poor because I couldn’t master the flash in my camera under the library’s fluoresecent lights.
This looks to be from around the turn of the [20th] century, when the Tooley St. building was quite new.
This photo was taken in 1929. The building closest to the [...]
The Marshalsea
21 12 08I’ve been getting my Christmas fill of film and TV adaptations of the works of Charles Dickens. A few days ago, I saw the last episode of the latest BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit. Overall, I found it disappointing. The biggest problem for me were the 30-minute episodes. Each one fairly raced along, as the [...]
Merry Christmas from the Barrow Boy and ‘is mate
15 12 08“At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in [...]
Happy birthday, Scrabble
15 12 08Today’s Independent has an interesting article on the history of Scrabble, which turns 60 tomorrow.
Scrabble pieces were even used to find the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy…
